Trust issues

Elite literary awards don't always signal readability.

Good morning, good weekend, hot summer, and welcome back to W.A.R. I’m your humble host, and as always, I appreciate your eyeballs and your attention. If this email was forwarded to you, “smash that subscribe button.” It’s free.

I’m finishing up Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer, and I’m loving it, which has surprised me since I didn’t like his first and mega-famous novel Everything Is Illuminated, and I only kind of liked his second novel Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close. But this 570-page doorstop about marriage, divorce, raising kids, and being extremely fucking Jewish, is so funny and so sad and really wonderful. Next on my nightstand: Telephone by Percival Everett and The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar.

What are you reading?

When I launched this newsletter in September 2020, my stated goal was to turn you on to books you might not know about, or in some cases give my own take on books you have already heard a lot about, but either way, I’ve strictly highlighted books I enjoyed and want to recommend to you. My private rule was: Why waste my time and yours telling you about a book I didn’t like?

For Issue 20, I have to break that rule.

Trust, which came out in May 2022, is so decorated with literary awards they can’t fit all the stickers on the cover of the paperback. It shared the Pulitzer this year with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, won the Kirkus Prize, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and made the NYT’s 10 Best Books of the Year and every other list.

The Times called Trust “exhilarating.” Oprah Daily called it “enthralling.”

Did they read the same book as I did?

Trust has of course already been optioned for an HBO drama series starring Kate Winslet. But if the series is true to the book, it’s going to be a pretty boring show.

Trust is four books in one, all about the same man, a Wall Street tycoon in the 1920s. But three of the four books are terribly dull.

The first 124 pages comprise a novel called Bonds (written by a Harold Vanner, whom we’ll learn more about in the third book) about a titan of finance (far from self-made, he starts off with generational wealth) named Benjamin Rask and his wife Helen. Bonds doesn’t have a single line of dialogue and reads like a Wikipedia summary of the life of a famous financier. Most writers detest that overwrought “show, don’t tell” idiom, but man, this novel-within-a-novel is all telling, with no showing. Rask has absolutely no passions, his marriage is joyless, and nothing of note really happens to him until his wife deals has a medical crisis and he handles it poorly. You get the impression Harold Vanner hates his own fictional character. (As we’ll learn, he does; and his character isn’t totally fictional.)

The second book is billed as a memoir: My Life by Andrew Bevel, who in a preface makes clear that he’s writing this memoir to “address and refute some of these fictions” about himself. The memoir is pompous and self-aggrandizing, and even though the joke is on Bevel (this section is intentionally badly written), it still manages to be boring. Bevel begins before his own birth, mapping out the lives of all his illustrious ancestors. The narrative voice is so unselfaware it’s shocking that this section of Trust isn’t funnier. (There is close to zero humor in Trust.) It becomes clear pretty quickly that there are parallels between Bevel and Benjamin Rask, except that in his memoir, Bevel colors himself a great public philanthropist who pulled out all the stops to care for his wife (unlike Rask in Bonds.)

Mercifully, My Life only lasts 60 pages; it peters out into mere manuscript notes, which is the only moment it becomes enjoyable: laughing at the author’s shorthand notes for what he plans to write in a certain chapter. (In a section called Early Years, he’s written: “MATH in great detail. Precocious talent. Anecdotes.” A section called Apprenticeship is left empty. A section on his success in the market ends with: “Brief paragraph on Mildred, domestic delights.”)

Warning: here come some minor spoilers about structure; maybe pause and come back to this issue later if you’re going to read the book.

The third section (180 pages long) is called A Memoir, Remembered by Ida Partenza, and it’s the book’s only vibrant portion. It has some intrigue and a Harriet the Spy feel (Partenza is given almost too much wild backstory of her own), but it begins 195 pages in to Trust—a long time to expect readers to wait.

I was always taught that a novel needs to grab you from the first sentence; who would give a novel 200 pages to get interesting? You wouldn’t, unless you’ve already read universal raves (could all these reviews be wrong?), which is a reminder that so often today, people select what to read from a short list of highfalutin arbiters, social media buzz, and celebrity book clubs. (Perhaps Trust’s most impressive achievement is getting readers to stick with it through the first 195 pages.)

If you read mostly new/current fiction (most of the people I know who are big readers do), think about how much you’re influenced by a tiny number of sources: magazine Top 10 lists, The New York Times Book Review, and awards. (I also just read Rabbit Hole by Tess Gunty, this year’s National Book Award winner, and was equally baffled.)

Literary awards are rarely given based on readability anymore. They too often stand for politics, public image, and other considerations apart from whether a book was the best book published that year. They too often award a perceived milestone. They’re like The Oscars.

My friend Ethan is one of the few readers I know who actively avoids reading brand new fiction. He likes to say almost all the books that are buzzy and hyped right now won’t stand the test of time, and I suspect he’s on to something. I’ve recently enjoyed some very memorable “cult classic” novels from the 1950s to the 1980s (Stoner by John Williams; Small World by David Lodge; Desperate Characters by Paula Fox, to name just a few), and every year I read a couple Dickens or Hardy novels, but the vast majority of books I choose to read were published in the last five years at the time I read them, and I think I should get away from that habit.

But I digress. Back to Trust: it’s worth asking why it’s been so emphatically critically acclaimed.

The answer, it seems, is that critics and readers are impressed with its structure. One story, told from four perspectives. Earlier this month, after I finished the first section of the novel (Bonds) and tweeted that it was boring, the gist of the replies I got were: keep going. One person told me, “It’s like a deconstructed novel.” Another said, “Wait for the turn and then the prestige… the first act is slow and tbh dumbed down by design. This book is a magic trick. Gotta be patient for the payoff.”

The problem is that I don’t think there is much of a payoff.

Warning: here come more major spoilers, which I’ve avoided until now.

The first twist, revealed through Ida’s section, is simply about the nature of the first two books: Vanner’s novel is a lightly fictionalized version of Bevel’s real life, and Bevel’s memoir (manuscript) is his attempt at image control, ghost-written with Ida’s paid help and never published anyway. The final slim section of Trust (40 pages), Mildred Bevel’s deathbed diary, gives us the final twist: Mildred was the brains behind Andrew’s financial success and brilliant market moves.

Since Mildred was conspicuously absent from the entire first couple hundred pages of the book—a sickly shadow in Vanner’s novel and a colorless victim in Bevel’s version of their life, it didn’t feel like a shock that in the end we’d finally get her perspective.

Even more to the point: the novel’s clear unsubtle message is about the stories we tell about ourselves and others, unreliable narrators, TRUST, etc etc. Three different people can recall the same events differently (see: Rashomon) and can have very different experiences of one person. Except that the takeaway from all four books within Trust can only be that Andrew Bevel was a self-delusional pompous ass. There’s no alternate version given that confuses things or gives us reason to side with him; his own memoir makes us laugh at him, and his wife’s diary finishes the job.

In support of the structure, I’ve also had people tell me that the opening two books are intentionally dull—after all, Ida Partenza later reports that Bevel complained that people only read Bonds because they knew who it was about: “I can tell you why this book is a sensation: because it’s patently about my wife and me. And because it makes us look bad.” In other words, even in the fictional Andrew Bevel’s world, Bonds by Harold Vanner became a bestseller despite it being an obviously boring novel. So why do we have to read it? Couldn’t a sneering fictionalized version of Bevel’s life story have opened Trust without it being so flat, and still had the same effect?

At least I’m not the only person on the planet who felt this way about Trust. Adam Mars-Jones nailed it in the London Review of Books: “Not a great deal has been done to bring curiosity to the boil, or even above room temperature… Whether it’s Benjamin and Helen or Andrew and Mildred, these are bloodless figures.” Mars-Jones also points out aptly, “It would have been a shrewder move to present Bonds only in extracts, as Ida reads them to understand what Bevel wants from her (this is where the story proper gets going anyway), rather than starting the book with an uncontextualised slab of prose that isn’t engaging as narrative.” Meanwhile, John Self (a great follow on Twitter) wrote in The Times of London, “The first two parts, Bonds and My Life, feel like a preface to the real thing, yet they take up half the book. That’s a lot of homework.”

If people are so impressed with the novel-within-a-novel as a literary device, I can think of far better examples: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen; & Sons by David Gilbert; Erasure by Percival Everett (first recommended to me by Adam Wilson, author of Sensation Machines, which I capsule-reviewed in May); The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker (made into a very good 2018 miniseries starring Patrick Dempsey, though you should read the book first); The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips (for which the author wrote an entire fake Shakespeare play—I enjoyed the play more than the story built around it); and of course, the all-timer, Nabokov’s Pale Fire (poem within a novel).

If you’ve made it this far, I appreciate you, and I figure you’ve either already read Trust and have your own take, or you don’t intend to read it. If you read it, I would truly love to hear your review. (And if you choose to read it even after reading my take, then I’ll really be interested to hear your review.) As always, you can reply directly to this email or (even more fun for the subscribers) you can comment on this issue publicly.

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